thanatology

March 04, 2015

noun

\than-uh-TAH-luh-jee\

Definition:

 the description or study of the phenomena of death and of psychological mechanisms for coping with them

Examples

One of the seminal texts on thanatology is Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's On Death and Dying, which outlines the five stages of grief.

"In her eight-week yoga for grief course, Stang … uses her background inthanatology—the scientific study of death, dying and bereavement—to educate participants about death and normalize their experiences." — Anna Medaris Miller, U.S. News & World Report, January 7, 2015

Did You Know?

In Greek mythology, Thanatos was the personification of death and the twin brother of Hypnos (Sleep). The ancient Greeks eventually came to use thanatos as a generic word for "death." Thanatology is a direct linguistic heir of the Greek term and was first documented in English in the mid-1800s. As a science, thanatology examines attitudes toward death, the meaning and behaviors of bereavement and grief, and other matters. In 1935, the word thanatos itself made its debut in English, ushered in with psychoanalytic theory to describe an unconscious tendency toward self-destruction.